The combination of discussion of psychology, and the apparent experience of the world in the style of a pervious age, in J.G. Ballard's THE DROWNED WORLD, seem to identify Jungian psychology as the main strain of the novel. A question that the reader quickly asks is: Is the novel simply a vehicle for Jungian mysticism in its idea of the dept to mind, and a collective unconscious. The protagonist, Robert Kerans, and his associate, Alan Bodkin, seem to express this belief clearly. The dubious Strangman attributes the Jungian theory to Kerans, although it is only Bodkin who ever expounds it - "That wasn't a true dream, Robert, but an ancient organic memory millions of years old." However, Bodkin never mentions Jung's name, and instead seems to express his ideas in ethological terms - the rising heat, new (or rather renewed) plants and animals, and changing geomorphology are acting as Innate Releasing Mechanisms, as the inhabitants of the flooding globe adapt to their new environment. Kerans identifies this change, in part, with death (and especially suicide), although authorial interpolations identify it with rebirth - the new Adam. The death and time references tie with the IRMs to relate to other Ballard stories such as the "The Reptile Enclosure" and "The Voices of Time", but the references to the changing psychology send the reader back to Jung and the later work of Freud. But Ballard only uses Jung to ironically counterpose the theme with another interpretation of events.
Such an opinion - that THE DROWNED WORLD is not Jungian - is contrary to, say, Patrick Parrinder, who wrote "although the theory of evolution is used as an adjunct to Ballard's visions of present-day environmental disaster, it is clear that the man 'scientific' background for these stories (PP also discusses "The Reptile Enclosure") is not biology, as it was for Wells, but Jungian psychology. The sea towards which life regresses stands for the womb 85 Ballard's fiction is a progressive subjugation of every feature of external reality to the demands of the 'collective unconscious'".
For Parrinder the novel is about the power of the central character's mind to change his conception of the world ("determined" as it were, to destroy it, or only appreciate it in decay). If THE DROWNED WORLD were Jungian such an interpretation would not really be valid, and, in fact, finally the book is not Jungian, and part of its power lies in its denial of the Jungian interpretation before a material one - the experience of a future, changed world.
The heating of the earth by solar flares, and its subsequent submersion causes the planet to pass into a state similar to that of the Carboniferous or Triassic ages. Animals quickly appear is if they were of those periods - a pelycosaur manages to develop in only seventy years, alligators, iguanas and reptiles generally become the dominant species. This, Bodkin says, is the world in which many psychic traces were left, by fear, millions of years before in an earlier evolutionary stage; which can now appear - not as dreams but as result of everyday life. If, as Bodkin says, it is fear that left the archetypal scars, it would be odd of Kerans to accept such a return of fright. And it is from this base that Ballard separates from Jung: what Bodkin says may not be the truth or the whole truth; what Kerans does, is what Ballard has said explains the action - "Kerans is the only one to do anything meaningful. His decision to stay, to come to terms with the changes taking place within himself, to understand the logic of his relationship with the shifting biological kingdom, and his decision to finally go south and greet the sun, is a totally meaningful course of action. The behaviour of the other people, which superficially appears to be meaningful - getting the hell out, or draining the lagoons - is totally meaningless."
The point about Jung's collective unconscious and its archetypes is that, ultimately, it was used to explain the problems of Jung's patients (and sometimes himself) in their own time, millennia after the period in which the archetypes could have any consequence. Jungians have argued that these archetypes are continually found, and look for them especially in mainstream literature. Ballard refers to this, and then turns away.
The central image of THE DROWNED WORLD is necessarily water. This water world is directly associated with the womb, amniotic fluid etc bot by psychologists, and by the characters in the novel. Ballard includes the idea in other works - in "The Venus Hunter" Kandinski writes that "just as the sea was a universal image of the unconscious, so space was nothing less than an image of psychosis and death"; and David Pringle, in his study EARTH IS THE ALIEN PLANET has pointed out many similar water references.
Now, in THE DROWNED WORLD, Ballard mingles references to this image with Jungian references, ultimately for ironic purposes. The hero's surname, Kernas, was taken from the captain of HMS Amethyst, who ran the communist blockade on the Yellow River through Shanghai in 1949. Kerans, then, has associations with water in history, and possibly autobiographical associations with the flooded paddies of Ballard's Chinese boyhood. But the potentially mythic Captain Kerans' first name was John, not Robert. Although Robert is one of Ballard's stock list, it was the first name of one of Jung's major influences - Robert Mayer - who developed his idea (Jung tells us) during voyages as a ship's doctor in 1840/41. Dr Bodkin has the same name as Dr Maud Bodkin, the author of the Jungian literary study ARCHETYPAL PATTERNS IN POETRY, a large part of which deals with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. One might think that the addition of Beatrice Dahl would clearly identify a Jungian anima (with contemporary references in that her art collection seems suggested by Peggy Guggenheim, and thus returning to the psychologists through the surrealists) but it becomes clear that THE DROWNED WORLD is not Jungian when we recognise that that the reality of Kerans', Bodkin's Hardman's experience. They respond to the material world in which their experiences have an immediate cause. There is no room for solar myth because the sun itself is central to their life - it blinds Hardman, it enervates them all, their blood pulses with the corona; the deep worlds to which Jung claimed he went in dreams to meet dwarfs, phalli etc, here have a physical reality in the exploration of the immersed cities and co-habitation with the reptiles among the gyrosperms; the stress of the novel set in a future where events take place that have not occurred in our experience, is little different to that of Ballard's more sere works set in the present or near-present, such as THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION, CRASH or "The Subliminal Man". The consciousness, such as it is, of Kerans arises from his material conditions, in the case where the world changes massively so that consciousness must also change. "The logic of (Kerans') relationship with the shifting biological kingdom" may be incapable of other exposition - in words or mathematical symbols - but it is real for him and has arisen from his experience and relationship with his surroundings. This is just as Trallis/Traven experiences the world in THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION where Traven cannot come to terms with it. THE DROWNED WORLD represents a four dimensional habitation in space and time for Kerans; the a-chronous breakdown represents T's failure to inhabit THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION.
In a famous series of dreams Jung, before World War One, saw Europe laying beneath his secure Switzerland flooded by blood. The dream interpretation of personal relevance completely failed him - "I drew the conclusion that they had to do with me myself, and decided that I was menaced by a psychosis. The idea of war did not occur to me at all." Similarly, he says of the unconscious, "Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation , and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious condition and to experience itself as a whole" - how this can come about is not clear, particularly as Jung sometimes used the archetypes to relieve a psychosis. The world in which these massive forces of millions of years exude themselves is nothing if one has to live them in a suit and tie and office job; and that is what Jung ultimately supplied to his patients. Psycho-analysis was directly concerned with "Civilisation and Its Discontents" and could attribute psychological disturbances to cultural and physical constraints, but Jung could never do that. "We are in a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct it. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgement about ourselves or our lives", he wrote, and in his MEMORIES DREAMS REFLECTIONS Jung described his experience of the archetype, mythic figures etc in a chapter called "Confrontation With The Unconscious" - a confrontation he resolved only by talking to fantasy figures in his head.
The ultimate reality for the characters of THE DROWNED WORLD is a material one, in which they respond and relate to their world. Kerans may be a "new Adam" but he is without Eve; Kerans may move to the zone of stronger sunlight but he does not enter a solar myth, instead he responds to "the sun: pulse equation"; when Kerans meets the deranged Hardman in the jungle on "their common odyssey southwards", he feels "that Hardman's real personality was submerged deep within his mind, and that his external behaviour and responses were merely pallid reflections of this, overlaid by his delerium and exposure symptoms. There is no suggestion that Hardman, study of whom originally lead Bodkin to his conclusions, is responding to archetypal drives or that Kerans is affected that way, either. Kerans watches "the contracting disc of the sun, its surface stirring rhythmically", and events about him seem to echo or mirror it. But these are all outside of him. Ballard describes personality as surviving, unlike Brian Aldiss's HOTHOUSE, where it disappears with the runts of the species.
Some critics have rejected THE DROWNED WORLD and Ballard's other works for their isolated view of meaningful existence but to the characters involved their actions are given meaning by the circumstance; everything is done for a purpose. In THE DROWNED WORLD the consciousness of the protagonist to experience the world changes as the world changes materially. Ballard does not suggest that mystical or psychic forces in the mind are at work. Given that this is so, the allegedly Marxist (ie materialist) criticism of someone like H. Bruce Franklin is bizarre. The basis of Marxism is of human consciousness in the world shaped its economic forces; that Franklin in "What Are We To Make Of J. G. Ballard's Apocalypse?" writes otherwise, suggests that he is one of those Marxists who lead Marx to exclaim "All that I know is that I am not a Marxist". Ballard is not, either, but his vision is a material one, and he provides plenty of references to interpretations that could be made - such as the Jungian - of events in the drowned world, which ultimately are not justified, to reject them. Not matter what we feel about it now, "After a few nights you won't be frightened of the dreams, despite their superficial horror." The dreams end with the beginning of the journey south.